It is well recognized and appreciated that there is a shortage of personnel necessary to provide a full complement of retail service employees. This shortage appears across the retail spectrum, and is perhaps best exemplified by the personnel shortage in the fast food industry. Because of the salary levels typically in place, employers (and the public) are increasingly forced to rely on a decreasing labor pool with the inability to obtain the number and level of personnel which would otherwise be preferred.
In addition to the shortage of personnel, the requirements, particularly in the fast food industry, that an employee typically take an order, accept payment and generate change, and collect and deliver the order results in inefficiencies and errors. Further, there always exists the risk of loss through pilferage, employee theft, as well as hold-up, fraud and the like. These problems are not limited to the fast food industry. Wherever employees are required to process orders and payments there exists the potential for error, theft, and product shrinkage.
Many of these problems can be eliminated or at least minimized by the utilization of automated equipment to augment or replace the human factor. Towards this end, numerous approaches have been taken to provide a variety of automated order entry systems in a variety of environments. Representative of this prior art are U.S. Pat. No(s). 4,310,885; 4,530,067; 4,553,222; 4,582,172; 4,676,343 and 4,735,289.
In general, the prior art is directed to various facets of the automated cashier system, but does not disclose or suggest a fully integrated system able to operate in a variety of retail environments.